Curious I wonder what the local public high schools would do in case like this:

"The principal of Gig Harbor High School said Thursday that a school official should not have shown the parents of a student the video-surveillance footage of the girl kissing another girl in the cafeteria. And he vowed that such an incident wouldn't happen again.

But Principal Greg Schellenberg said an investigation has found that no rules or policies were broken.

"It wasn't a violation of policy and procedure ... but we all agree it was not a good use of surveillance," Schellenberg said. "It was an abnormal use of our equipment and it won't happen again. This is not a Big Brother institution."

Even so, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington said the group plans to look into the matter.

"I have a hard time believing this incident would've been handled the same way if it was a heterosexual couple," said spokesman Doug Honig.

I used to live a few miles from Gig Harbor. It is the town just on the other side of the famous Tacoma Narrows Bridge, whose collapse everyone has seen a million times - Cute place, but a somewhat conservative haven compared to neighboring towns. Their State Rep walked out of the Chamber in protest a few years back when a Muslim cleric gave the daily nondenominational prayer after 9/11. You also might remember it as the home to the stripmall parking lot where, in 2003, the Police Chief of Tacoma infamously murdered his separated wife in front of their kids and then turned the gun on himself.

All that said, how would a situation of PDA in the school cafeteria, by a young gay couple, be handled in the supposedly liberal Berkshires? Any different than a hetero pair?  ¶ 2:37 PM 0 comments

  Big Rumors on the Restaurant Front A successful local restaurateur is making a play for a recently vacated restaurant site, reportedly with the full endorsement of the powers that be.

That is all.....  ¶ 9:08 AM 4 comments

  Busy, busy, busy.... I will post original content again, someday....

In the meantime, if you know of anybody who can make 200 sandwiches in and hour and a half while keeping their sanity and a smile on their face, send 'em my way.  ¶ 8:45 PM 0 comments

  Very Sad Rest In Peace Lt. Cmdr. Davis:

A Pittsfield native and Blue Angels pilot was killed yesterday afternoon when the jet he was flying crashed during an air show at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort in South Carolina, according to Tom McGill, a family friend.

McGill, a former Taconic High School teacher, confirmed last night that the pilot was Navy Lt. Cmdr. Kevin J. Davis, formerly of Pittsfield.

...

Initial reports indicated that Blue Angel No. 6, an F/A-18 Hornet, crashed into a heavily populated area after it plummeted below the tree line near the air fields, about 30 minutes after the air show began.

  ¶ 9:01 AM 0 comments

  The day the GOP lost all hope of winning in '08 Yesterday.

My personal views on the issue are unimportant, but it is very clear that short of a major faux-pas or a major unforeseen event that reshapes the playing field (i.e. nukes in D.C. or L.A.) that the GOP has just jumped the shark with swing voters on the social issues. The overwhelming majority of the independent voters in the US label themselves as pro-choice and they ain't gonna' be votin' Republican.

Alito will be the last hard-line conservative nominated to the SCOTUS for at least a decade, if not longer.  ¶ 7:59 PM 3 comments

  Is it my imagination... ... or do most of The Transcript's letters to the editor that represent extreme or forceful right-wing views come from people who live out of state?

Odd.  ¶ 4:38 PM 4 comments

  The Nor'easter The storm has taken its first casualty at our house. The wind got a hold of the front storm door and, well.... Greenberg's here I come.

Just one more thing on the endless list of repairs and updates on a 90+ year old house.

Next up - The siding!  ¶ 12:31 PM 4 comments

  Remember the old gag about mailing yourself in a box to save money? It seems that that notion is a thing of the past. So is driving. I've brought this comment, from a bona fide airline pilot, to the main page. He makes some very interesting points:

Driving is much more expensive. You can buy a round trip ticket from Boston to Los Angeles today for $238.

If you drove a magic car that got 35 mpg and needed no maintenance or insurance, and you used a magic credit card that let you pay only $2.50/gal for gas, and you didn't need to stop for sleep for the 90 hours and 6010 miles of the round trip, or need any food for the same period...

...it would still cost you $429.28 to drive.

You could pack yourself into a box and ship yourself as freight. The round trip would take 8 days. Assuming you were small and took only enough luggage to fit into a 200 lb. package, it would cost $792.46.

If 8 days in a box is undesireable, you could ship yourself as overnight freight. The round trip would then cost you $2041.60.

The passenger airline industry in this country is completely broken. Freight pilots are paid 3 to 4 times as much as passenger pilots, their companies are making record profits, and no one is asking them to take pay cuts.

Think about that.

  ¶ 7:43 PM 2 comments

  If Mass MoCA issued stock, their shares would have gone up Sol Le Witt, who, along with Yale, has chosen Mass MoCA as the main archival repository of his work, has passed away at age 78.

Not to be morbid, but the cliche of nothing making an artist more popular than death, tends to be true. Bad for him. Good for us.

R.I.P.  ¶ 1:43 AM 0 comments

  Happy Easter   ¶ 3:00 AM 0 comments

  The 48% F-Bomb I wonder if any news outlets will actually dig a little deeper into this.

ROMULUS, Mich. (AP) — A Northwest Airlines flight was canceled because the pilot was yelling obscenities during a cellphone conversation while people were boarding, and cursed one passenger, a federal official said Saturday.

The pilot of the Las Vegas-to-Detroit flight was apparently in a heated cellphone conversation in the cockpit, then went into a lavatory, locked the door and continued the conversation, Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said Saturday.

Perhaps this episode has something to do with the fact that since a Bankruptcy Judge basically broke Northwest's unions, the people who fly these planes have taken a 48% pay cut.

That's right, folks. They've had their paychecks cut in half while their work hours have been extended by several *days* a month. (The airline can't put them in the air for more time, but it can leave them stranded away from home at a Motel 6 in Minot, ND. And that ain't good for family life.)

According to someone who would know, medical leaves and such, are way WAY up.

Kinda' makes you want to drive.....  ¶ 2:32 AM 1 comments

  After an extremely long day at work.... ... and a couple of beers, I find this to be very, very funny.

At the end, we are led to believe that the narrator has discovered his true interests and now enjoys green eggs and ham. But does he? Has he discovered his true tastes, or has he simply been forced under duress to accept a fundamentally unfair conclusion? Why do we assume that a green eggs and ham-liking narrator is in fact better off? Rather than simply accept the superiority of the outcome, future research should adopt a more critical stance, and at least take seriously the possibility that the narrator had good reasons for resisting the green eggs and ham. When the narrator in the end admits that “I will eat them ANYWHERE! [caps in original],” this can be read as such an extreme capitulation to the hegemony represented by Sam-I-Am that it becomes almost subversive of itself. Future research might inquire more deeply into the operation of such hegemony, using this implied critique as a point of entry.

The author is, in fact, considered one of the leading academic commentators on the Middle East and lives just down the road. There is a metaphor in here, somewhere.

Maybe tomorrow I'll think about deeper meanings. For now, I'll keep the Chesire Cat grin pasted on my face.  ¶ 9:29 PM 7 comments

  Should it stay? Or should it go? Rumor has it that tomorrow is the day that the fate of the Subway/Purple Pub/Perfect Blend building will be decided. Evidently the structure can be rehabbed, but at a considerable cost. Tomorrow the owner will visit the property for the first time since the fire and decide whether it makes more sense to call a carpenter or a bulldozer.

For the sake of all involved, I hope and pray that those individuals who were directly impacted by the fire be given first dibs on space in any new construction, should that be the decision that David Paresky makes.

Long Live The Purple Pub!  ¶ 9:20 PM 2 comments

  Indisputable Effects The Transcript's editorial today touches on the subject of anonymity in the news. It is interesting that Glenn chose the angle of anonymous reader comments, which must be very frustrating for him when someone has something worthwhile to add to a discussion, but refuses to go on the record.

One of the things I've noticed in the past four years is that there are a lot of people in the area that are afraid to speak their minds publicly. I am sure that much of the hesitancy is out of sheer New England politeness - "If you can't say anything nice...."

But there are obviously some who are afraid of the potential repercussions should they speak out against certain ideas or entities. Whether these fears are real or imagined is probably only discernible on a case by case basis. However, I assume that most of the readers of this blog have heard stories or rumors about a phone call to someone's boss or inspectors showing up at oddly coincidental moments.

Are these stories true? Maybe. Maybe not. But their effect is indisputable. People are afraid of the wrath of everything from the large employers in the area to city hall.

And that is no way to live.  ¶ 7:22 PM 6 comments